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Sweetie Belle thought that having a Cutie Mark meant she had it made. But when she fails an audition for a prestigious part, Rarity takes her aside to teach her about special talents, high society, and the true value of hard work. ·Golden Vision

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Inspiration is Rarity's Element, and Sweetie Belle her greatest achievement. But the filly has questions, ones that Rarity might not be able to answer on her own. What makes a pony? How can somepony know if they really are alive? Are they alive if they laugh and cry? Are they alive if they think, if they make mistakes and have ideas?

If Sweetie Belle is nothing more than a collection of wires, is she truly alive?

Why would you ever build sensors beneath the skin to detect pain? Seems like wasteful design to me, as soon as the skin is breached the construct should know that it is damaged and refrain from using the damaged leg.

Why do animals have sensors beneath the skin to detect pain? We can detect that our skin in breached and refrain from using the damaged leg. However, knowing something and feeling that it really hurts gives you a greater drive not to do stupid things like walk on a damaged leg, and real animals (including people) can do spectacularly stupid things without the right motivation.

>>26246672624667 Until Jeff Bridges enters the net and destroys the M.C.P. (Master Control Pony), gathering the data to prove he was the original creator of the M.L.P. (Matrix-Like Plot) in the first place.

What's so nice about this is it very simply outlines the differences between a mere computer and a living machine.

A living machine will be able to think in the abstract, consider potential beyond its current limits, imagine random thoughts and then act upon them in physical conditions.

It will be a new form of life, a conscious mind without an organic body and force us yet again to reexamine what life is.

For we think of bacteria and plants and many other organisms are alive, yet they possess no mind at all.

I have always felt that sapient life is a truly higher form of life, one that has taken a step beyond merely being a metabolizing, reproducing biochemical machine. As such a thinking machine will have gone beyond its own material composition.

Then the extra sensors still wouldn't make sense. The reason animals etc have nocicereptors (pain nerves) is indeed because we are quite dumb and tend to forget when we are hurt. However, a mechanical construct has near perfect memory.

Even if the actual simulated personality is just as dumb and forgetful as we are a simple memory chip that remembers skin breached locations is a lot cheaper and more efficient than implementing thousands of extra sensors. Just have the memory chip send a pain signal to the simulated brain whenever it tries to move the afflicted leg and you have the exact same effect as we experience.

Besides, don't you think it is quite annoying that we have pain nerves? Yes, they evolved to help us. But an ability to shut them off is highly useful. That's why doctors invented anesthetics. For a robot the ability to switch off pain should be much easier. It seems needlessly cruel to have Sweetie Belle suffer if Rarity could simply disconnect her pain sensors for a few seconds.

It could also be why we have pain receptors beneath our skin, so we know what other than our skin is damaged, even if the skin is not. It is actually easy to damage tissue beneath the skin without doing much damage at all to the skin. Houdini was killed by a punch to the gut that did not leave a bruise. In several types of robot, especially those that are shown on robot wars, damage to underlying components often happens before the outer covering layer is damaged in any noticeable way. So having pain receptors under her skin would make sense.

At the risk of repeating everyone else. :P Learning is essential to survival among other things. It would do us no lasting good if we simply stopped using the leg until it was better. We could bang ourself on the same spot over and over and suffer continually. By recognizing the source of the pain, we can avoid it. Besides, by, say, realizing that fire burns and causes injury we can yank our hand out of the fire, before irreparable damage occurs.

In the context of the story, an autonomous robot cannot depend on a handy repairman, and so it would be best to be avoid catastrophic damage itself/"instinctually".